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How not to eat Czech food

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How not to eat Czech food

As you might have expected, we eat out a lot when we do research for our Prague food tours, the Prague Foodie Map and this very blog. (Hey, we have an Instagram account and we try to post a picture a day, which means a meal out a day. Yeah, it’s hard to be us.) But in doing so, we often see foreign visitors do things that clearly identify them as foreign visitors and set them apart from the locals.

So we have investigated the phenomenon, asked around some of our favorite restaurants and came up with a list of “Czech food fails”: things done to Czech food by foreign visitors that make the locals either shake their head in disbelief or straight out cringe. Here’s how you don't eat Czech food in Prague restaurants. 


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Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep II: Ondra Hurtik

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Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep II: Ondra Hurtik

If you like coffee in Prague - and you should, it’s awesome - then Ondra Hurtik needs no introduction. The reigning Czech barista champion and the runner up of the 2015 Coffee in Good Spirits competition, Ondra has been a prominent figure on the Prague coffee scene for years. And as one of the faces of the ubiquitous Doubleshot roasters, he can be mostly seen behind the espresso machine of Kavarna Misto or Muj salek kavy, unless he’s training in Doubleshot’s barista training centre in the Karlin district.

What are his favorite places in Prague? Where does he like to go and - most importantly - what is his favorite cafe in Prague? Our summer intern Nicole has interviewed him a while back, as he was training for the World Barista Championships in Dublin.


Where to stay in Prague?

Where to stay in Prague?

Sure, we may run what we think are the finest Prague food tours, but that does not mean we don’t get asked about where to stay in Prague. We do our best to help by inviting our guests to send us a shortlist of the hotels or apartments they have chosen and then give them our two cents on each of their choices. We love to travel, so we like to think we’re in a good position to combine our local knowledge with some of our travel know-how.  

With this post, we want to help you understand the different areas of Prague and their pros and cons. When we travel ourselves, we always look for a balance between easy accessibility to the centre of the town and getting a feel for what we think is a local, true, and interesting part of the city that we visit. So, we will be recommending areas along those lines. We will also throw in a few apartments and hotels we ourselves would like to stay in if we travelled to Prague. And yes, some of these recommendations will be based on our personal experience. (Which is gained when you do non-simultaneous house swaps, rent your own rental apartment and have to book a hotel in your own city because you promised someone to stay in your apartment while you're in Prague.) But don’t worry, we will not push our beautiful, awesome and super cool rental apartment in Prague that has no peers too hard. Oops.


Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep I: Julka a.k.a. Maskrtnica

Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep I: Julka a.k.a. Maskrtnica

If you have ever had any good food in Prague, the odds are you may have tasted some of the creations by Julka, otherwise known as Maskrtnica in the blogosphere. Julka has baked the first breads for the open-faced sandwiches in Sisters, and is the woman behind the Prague food phenomenon that are the vanilla custard donuts in Maso a kobliha. She’s also supplying bread to, and consulting breads with, a variety of great restaurants and bistros in Prague, and is one of the forces behind the Pecem Pecen project and the Sourdough Map, which have singlehandedly brought back the tradition of baking sourdough bread at home. So yup, she’s a big deal.

And it shows: we’ve tried to meet her for weeks now, after she’s come back from her 3-month tour of the US where she went through a series of short internships and visits in various artisanal bakeries, and still could not get a proper hour to sit down and have a nice chat. In between pop-ups, festivals and consulting, she’s that busy. And no wonder. If there’s one person that embodies bread in Prague, it is her (and perhaps Tomas at the Praktika bakery). So we’re happy that she at least shared her five favorite places in Prague, and her five favorite social media accounts.


Nase maso's Czech meatloaf recipe

Nase maso's Czech meatloaf recipe

You see, traditional Czech cuisine is all about guilty pleasures. You know you should not do it. You know it’s bad for you. But once in a while, when no-one’s looking, you just need a bit of sweet satisfaction from a pice of juicy pork belly or a crunchy schnitzel. It’s just so damn delicious, and nobody can stay so strong for long.

And the same goes for the meatloaf at the Nase Mase butcher shop. Meatloaf?!? Not the first you would order when you travel, but this particular meatloaf, juicy and tender and moist and beautiful, is - believe it or not - one of the most popular meals of our Prague food tour. Yes, we later visit other restaurants for fancy sit-down meals where you can inspect chefs’ tweezer work, but when we ask at the end what was our guests’ favorite meal, the meatloaf always gets a dreamy mention. It’s just that good. Heck, when Nase maso opened, the butchers held a competition for the best meatloaf recipe: each butcher would prepare their own, and the winning recipe would become the recipe of the butcher shop. Jirka Michal’s grandma’s recipe was the clear winner.


Best wine bars in Prague

Best wine bars in Prague

Sure, Prague nightlife may be mostly associated with Czech beer (and lots of Czech beer), but Czech wine, after a long but troubled past especially during the Communist rule, has been making a big comeback recently. Never heard of Czech wine? No wonder. With a production capped by the EU at about 1% of the French production of wine, there are hardly any exports of Czech and Moravian wine abroad. Yes, we like to keep it all to ourselves. Sorry.

And that’s exactly whyvisiting a wine bar is one of the best things to do in Prague. Prague wine bars tend to be intimate, small bars that serve good wines from the Bohemian and Moravian wine regions and from abroad. They also sell somewine gifts, like organic grape seed oils, grape jelly and other produce made by Czech and Moravian winemakers, which would make for a great, conveniently small souvenir. And you will be surprised how good Czech and Moravian wines can be. Many of our guests surely are, and that's why we make a point of tasting Czech wines in the course of our Prague food tour. (And of course, we taste Moravian wines during our Moravian wine tours, too.)

These are the best wine bars in Prague in our opinion. You probably weren’t planning to create your own wine tour in Prague, but a visit to any of these wine bars in Prague may change your mind and plans for good. Hey, you were warned, okay?


Looking for new Tasters of Prague!

Looking for new Tasters of Prague!

This is a big one, but we'll keep it short.

Want to join us? Help us do what we do? Yes, we’re looking for new Tasters of Prague! Qualifications? You should be a nice, friendly person. And if you genuinely like to meet new people, that’s a bonus. You should like food. A lot. Oh, and English and Czech are a must. In exchange, we offer lots of fun. Job satisfaction. Okay, we’ll throw in candy, too. Oh yeah, and money, of course. Sounds good? Please fill in our short form! We’ll get back to you soon. And please share if you know someone who’d be great at this. Thank you! We can't wait to meet you. Really.


Best breakfast in Prague

Best breakfast in Prague

If you’ve read this blog before, you know we love breakfast and wrote about breakfast in Prague before. We can’t honestly think of a better way to start the day than just relax, let it all hang out, have an opulent breakfast and prepare for what the day has to offer. 

And because we like breakfast so much, we do fully realize that the "state of breakfast in Prague” is still not ideal. Just look at the thumbnails of the pictures we’ve taken: eggs, eggs and more eggs. Creative dishes for breakfast in Prague are rare and far apart. But things have been changing, as more people have become used to eating breakfast out over the weekends. Two years ago, getting breakfast on a Sunday did not require much thought. Today, you are out of luck if you don’t reserve tables ahead in many popular places. (So please do.) We believe and hope that the pictures for the next update of this post will offer more variety. Fingers crossed.

These are our favorite breakfast spots in Prague. (Special thanks go to our friends Honza and Pavla who shared many Sunday breakfasts with us, coming in super hungry and then waiting patiently as we take the perfect picture of each spread.)


Our Tokyo trip

Our Tokyo trip

When we were planning the trip to Tokyo, we were approaching our stay with respect and a bit of caution. We were intimidated by the different culture, the impenetrable language and rigid customs. Having spent nearly a week in Tokyo, we must say the respect has grown, while the caution disappeared. We absolutely loved our stay in Tokyo. Staying in Tokyo gets you the thrill and excitement of seeing something new and different, and none of the intimidation of seeing something new and different.  

When we were planning our three-week Asian trip, we've reserved one week for Tokyo. What a mistake. We really would love to spend more time in Tokyo, and venture out into other Japanese cities, too. Oh well. Don’t repeat our mistake. If you’re planning a trip to Tokyo, reserve the time the city deserves. We’ve already promised ourselves we would be back. 


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